The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

farmers so, after much debate, we ended up maintaining our minimal support. Today this USAID “graduate” pro- ject is an expanding, private-sector success. Alex Newton Mission Director USAID/Bamako usu A D IFFERENT R EALITY Before I began my Peace Corps assignment in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 2002, I thought it was going to be the easiest experience ever. Though I had never lived overseas before, I had traveled a lot outside of the United States. I also had a few years of work under my belt. And as if all that weren’t enough, I’d grown up around people of other cultures: not only is my father an immigrant, but he’s from Slavic Eastern Europe. Considering myself a sophisticated New Yorker (OK, you caught me — Long Islander), I remember worrying about a fellow volunteer I’d met during the pre-departure orientation. Adam was from Alabama, and I was sure he was in for a huge culture shock when we landed in Ukraine. Naturally, I was wrong. Adam adjusted with no problem, while I was the one who struggled. But I promised myself I’d stay at least a year, and if I was still lost and confused then — well, life is too short to stay someplace where you are not happy. Fortunately, a few months into my stint I started to find my way, settle in, do meaningful work and make real friends. Two things helped me do that. The first is, I stopped asking “why?” For instance, Ukrainians don’t smile on the street or stand in a line, and in a business situation it may take a while before someone will be up front with you (if ever). Once I learned to stop being upset about all that, take it for what it is, and work within their context — after all, I am a guest in their country — things really came together quickly. (And now I, too, wonder why Americans smile so much. They must be a bunch of happy idiots.) The second lesson I learned is that what we think is rational behavior is actually culturally defined. The correct reaction to a given situation seems ridiculously obvious to us, so it can be really frustrating when peo- ple act “irrationally.” But once I realized I was in a dif- ferent reality, and understood that I needed to be open to redefining the best way to achieve a goal, everything changed for the better. And while I was at it, it never hurt to check to be sure that my Ukrainian counterpart and I were actual- ly talking about achieving the same goal. Emily Ronek Public Affairs Section Embassy Caracas usu S PIES R U S When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the early 1990s in Tunisia, we bought into the idea that folks from the embassy, including the USAIDmission, were all spies and couldn’t be trusted. Any request for a conversation or information was to be carefully considered, analyzed for its ulterior motive, and perhaps avoided. This line did not come from the Peace Corps leadership. Rather, it was lore among the youthful volunteers, perhaps based on some grain of truth from a different time. Now, as a Foreign Service officer on the other side, I see how wrong we were to be so suspicious, and how valuable good communications between volunteers and the embassy really are. Talking to volunteers helps us understand what is going on at the local level. David Thompson Director, Municipal Development and Democratic Initiatives Office USAID/Tegucigalpa usu I T ’ S A S MALL W ORLD A FTER A LL For my first two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia (1980-1982) I was an audiovisual adviser to the Department of Cooperation’s Training Center in Yundum, just outside the capital. There I taught my counterparts how to edit the monthly co-op extension worker newsletter and trained them to teach groundnut (peanut) farmers to read the scale. The editorial training went well, but the scale-reading instruction was an abysmal failure. It turned out that the extension workers didn’t want the farmers to read the scale, because they were cheating them when they sold their groundnuts. But that’s another story. In 1983, while serving as a third-year Peace Corps F O C U S 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8